Few modern Japanese novelists have found American audiences. Haruki Murakami, author of critically acclaimed novels like ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) and ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' (Kodansha International, 1989), and Banana Yoshimoto, who wrote ''Kitchen'' (Grove Press, 1993), are among the handful who have a following in the United States.

For Haruki Murakami, Japan's most popular living fiction writer, the current struggle against terrorism is no clash of civilizations, much less a crusade. Rather, as the novelist sees it, the war that opposes the United States and its allies against reputed terrorist groups like al Qaeda is a collision between incompatible networks, or what he calls circuits, whose apprehension of reality is every bit as irreconcilable as matter and antimatter. And whose collisions are bound to be just as explosive.

Haruki Murakami's latest novel, ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' is a wildly ambitious book that not only recapitulates the themes, motifs and preoccupations of his earlier work, but also aspires to invest that material with weighty mythic and historical significance. In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book.

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October 1, 2013, Tuesday

Multimedia

During Sam Anderson’s trip to Japan for his interview with the novelist Haruki Murakami, he visited the places mentioned in Murakami’s fiction as well as sites significant to Murakami’s life and career.

Haruki Murakami Navigator

A list of resources from around the Web about Haruki Murakami as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.